Fear in Forest Hills

The anger, the curses, the denunciation of public officials, the rock throwing--all evoked memories of Little Rock and Selma. But this was not the South resisting racial integration. This was New York, that reputed citadel of liberalism.

The protest against a large public-housing project for low-income--and presumably mostly black--residents did not occur in a neighborhood of George Wallaceite hardhats or poor whites. The emotion erupted in Forest Hills, Queens, a comfortable community of mostly middle-class Jews, who had struggled for years against the discrimination that long prevented them from living there.

Most of the anger was directed at New York Mayor John Lindsay, who had pursued the idea of scattering housing for the poor throughout the city, rather than erecting still more public housing in ghetto areas. If any neighborhood should accept that idea, it seemed, it would be Forest Hills, which had voted for Lindsay in his two successful mayoralty elections. Yet as soon as the site was announced in 1966, neighborhood opposition began. Residents organized an association to block the project and won temporary delays in court. The Queens Jewish Community Council, representing 53 smaller groups, joined in fighting the project.

But Lindsay refused to retreat from the plan, which was to build 840 units, including three 24-story apartment buildings, on an 8.5-acre site at a cost of about $30 million. The site is a vacant tract near the busy Long Island Expressway. Officials said that some 40% of the new units were to be reserved for the elderly, al though neighbors were not convinced that this promise would be kept. They also feared that they would be inundated by ghetto blacks. Actually, considerable integration seemed likely; nearly half of the original applicants for apartments were from Forest Hills itself, many of them white.

Destroy Lindsay. Nonetheless, when construction was about to begin last week, some 300 residents attended a protest rally at which Jerry Birbach, president of the Forest Hills Residents Association, denounced the "arrogance, ineptitude and political skulduggery" of Mayor Lindsay. Protesters carried signs declaring: LINDSAY is TRYING TO DESTROY QUEENS. NOW QUEENS WILL DESTROY LINDSAY.

They marched in a torchlight procession to the construction site, smashed the windows of construction trailers with rocks, blocked traffic on the expressway and threatened to set fire to construction facilities. Shouted one demonstrator: "If this was Harlem, these trailers would have been burned long ago!" Police called for help as the mob threatened to get out of control, and some 20 officers restored order.

The project's opponents sharply denied that they objected to blacks moving into their neighborhood (of the 38,000 residents closest to the site, only about 1% are black). They spoke instead about their fears of overcrowded schools, rising crime and deterioration of the neighborhood, pointing out that this had happened in the communities many of them had moved away from. New York Conservative-Republican Senator James Buckley, carrying his protest to George Romney, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, also argued that soil conditions on the site were so bad that construction costs would soar, and that the lack of air conditioning in the plans meant that airplane noise from nearby La Guardia Airport would be intolerable for the residents. After hearing Buckley, Romney agreed that he would review the project, even though his department had already approved the necessary financing.

No Knish Now. The controversy had some of the overtones of New York's acrimonious school conflict of 1968, in which relations between blacks and Jews were strained in arguments over the control of neighborhood schools. Again Lindsay was assailed for seeming to side with the blacks. "Mayor Lindsay has shown he is not interested in the Jewish population of his constituency," charged the Queens Jewish Community Council. "It will not be enough for him this year to put a yarmulke on his head and eat a knish."

Undaunted, Lindsay denounced the protest tactics as "deplorable," and said the city must decide "whether we will guide ourselves by rationality and truth or whether we shall permit ourselves to be misled by misunderstanding and fear." Liberal Democratic Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal, who represents parts of Forest Hills, joined Buckley in opposing the project, but conceded: "A thing like this makes us all act in a fashion that both the community and I are not proud of--it brings out the inherent prejudice in all of us."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.